Santa Catalina Island

We went to Santa Catalina Island on Thursday. Jerry wanted to take the 15 minute helicopter ride to the island but I, being cheap, suggested the less expensive, one-hour boat ride. We had planned on taking the boat from the Queen Mary landing but that is closed after Labor Day. So we had to drive into Long Beach to catch our boat.

But it turned out that we got to see our home away from home on the way out of the port. We were inside the Commodore Lounge and saw the Queen Mary through slightly hazy windows that had the sun shining on them. So the pictures from the boat are rather washed out.

If you follow the line of the mast near the boat's stern (on the left) down to the round portholes just below the rectangular windows on the ship's Promenade deck, you'll be looking at the portholes in our room. Sorry that the picture is so fuzzy.

Here's the boat that took about 65 minutes to take us the 26 miles to the island.

We wandered through Avalon and quickly got bored with their touristy junk shops. After lunch we got tickets for the two-hour Skyline Drive tour. The tour wasn't in the towed bus-thing shown in the tour's video. We were in an old bus. Jerry and I sat right behind the driver and had a great view.

Here's the view of Avalon as we're climbing up the hill.

The road was very windy and narrow. And it had steep drops but was lined with eucalyptus trees to keep us from careening to our deaths. At one point Richard, our tour guide and driver, said that we had to do a stretch of the road with no slowing. I started making a movie just after he started this mad dash up the mountain. I hope this gives you a feel for what we went through.


The tour took us to the Airport in the Sky where we had 20 minutes to recover from the thrill ride up the mountain.

This is the bus that brought us safely up to the airport.

There's a nature center that has a tile map of the island. Here's Jerry looking at the far end of the island. Avalon is at the narrow part of the island near the left end of the island and the airport is about half way to the far end.

A feature of the tour is visiting with the bison that were imported for a silent movie that was filmed on the island.

On the way back to Avalon, we got to stop at a scenic spot overlooking the ocean.  I took five pictures and Photoshop Elements did a bang-up job of pasting them together for me. Aren't computers and some computer programs amazing?

(I guess Blogger has a limit to the width of pictures. This was much larger. The picture is all there, they just shrunk it. If anybody needs to see a more detailed version, just ask and I'll email it to you.)

Here's another view of Avalon's bay as we're coming back into town.

Here are the condos where Richard, the tour guide, says Babs is an owner.

I found this juxtaposition of the psychic and the Coke machine amusing.

Not only can you enjoy a Coke with your Full Life Reading, you can visit the psychic in her Santa Barbara location.  I suppose she uses astral projection to commute between the two spots.

There was a beautiful sunset on the return trip but my camera couldn't deal with it.  Here's a blurry picture to give you a bit of an idea what we got to see.

It was a nice way to spend a day.  Next time we'll have to take one of the longer tours.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A ceramic lamp from Jonathan Adler that we got while on vacation last week.

First, with only the light it's putting out at night.

Then in the day with a flash.

They had a cute manifesto posted by their door (there's a terrible reflection that I tried to soften. I should have used a polarized filter).

Squill blooming after all these years

Our giant squills are blooming this year! They took last year off so I was hoping for an exceptional show. But there are only three stalks. We planted three bulbs and each has divided so I was hoping for six flowers. Maybe next year.

The stalk on the left is 5'11" tall.

These are fun flowers to put in a vase. They sway back and forth. One would be pointing far to the left when we leave for work and by the time we get home in the evening it would be peeking around the corner to the right. They last a long time after you've cut them. If you want to make a statement in your grand foyer, these are the flowers to use. Of course, if you don't live in aMediterranean climate, you won't have a lot of luck growing them.

The flowers open from the bottom of the stalk and work their way to the top. Here's what the section with the open flowers looks like.

The bulbs each weighed about 10 pounds. That worked out to be about a dollar a pound. Such a deal!

It hasta be pasta!

One of our stops on our little trip to Orange and Los Angeles Counties was Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. One of the stores there is Williams-Sonoma. We had been to one of their stores earlier in the week on our San Diego-area shopping day. But we thought we had time so why not browse here.

Good thing we did. There is a new KitchenAid mixer attachment! A Williams-Sonoma exclusive!

We picked up the KitchenAid Pasta Press.

It makes your spaghetti. It makes your bucatini. You want fusilli? You got fusilli. It extrudes your macaroni (both large and small). And it makes rigatoni.

We made rigatoni for supper last night. Jerry made tomato cream pesto sauce from Betty Crocker's Pasta Cookbook that came in one of the more successful General Mills Christmas C.A.R.E packages.

Everything turned out very nice.

I've created yet another YouTube video in the How To & Style category that shows the extrusion process. I didn't bother with the mixing of the dough. Jerry makes a cameo appearance.

Here it is!

And here is supper with its sauce.

Mmmmmmmmm!

Food fit for a Queen

Jerry and I took a little vacation this week. We started the week by doing San Diego activities then headed north for a few days.

Here's what I ate on the road.

Our first stop was Laguna Beach where they have art galleries. We didn't buy anything except lunch. We ate at the Heidelberg Pastry Bistro.

I had the Spicy Heidelberg Wrap and iced tea. It wasn't terribly spicy. It was good.
This was across the street from the Pottery Shack that isn't there anymore. It's now The Old Pottery Place where they have a cafe, an art gallery, tchotchke shops, etc. I'll miss the Pottery Shack.

We then shopped for a while in the downtown part of Laguna Beach for a few hours then headed to our hotel in Long Beach.

Jerry comes up with fun vacations. We stayed on the Queen Mary for a couple of nights. For dinner the first night we ate in the Promenade Café.

I had fettuccine with vegetables. (I forgot to take the picture until I had eaten quite a bit of it. Sorry.)

The next morning we had breakfast in their coffee shop. We had bagels with cream cheese and caffè americano. (Again, I forgot to take the picture until after I had started eating. There's a bite missing from the bottom half.)

We then took the Catalina Express to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. I don't know if the hotel upgraded us to the Commodore Lounge on the way to the island or if it was part of the package Jerry booked. (We were planning on taking the boat from the Queen Mary but that service gets turned off after Labor Day so we had to go to the downtown port. Maybe they upgraded us for our inconvenience.) Because we were in the Commodore Lounge, we got a cookie and a beverage.

Here's my chocolate chip cookie with the usual missing bite because I forgot to take my picture in time.

And my mimosa.

There's not much to do in Avalon. There are tourist junk shops. And restaurants. (There are tours around the island but that's another story.) We had lunch at a café on the water.

I had a mushroom veggie burger and fries. I forgot about taking a picture until I was finished. It's just as well, it wasn't terribly good. The mushrooms had no flavor and the burger was pretty flavorless, too, in spite of all the flavorful ingredients the menu said it contained. Don't bother with the Busy Bee Café when you visit Avalon. Jerry wasn't thrilled with his lunch, either.

Veggie burger and fries aftermath:

(As you can see I finished it anyway.)

Our return trip wasn't until 7:30 so we had dinner in Avalon. It was much better than lunch. Jerry enjoyed the aroma of the smoker cooking food at El Galleon and they had pasta primavera for the picky eater so that's where we ate.

My pasta primavera before even one bite was taken!
(We didn't keep what they called "souvenir glasses.")

We sat on the outside deck of the boat on our return to Long Beach. There was a beautiful sunset.

We had some shopping to do in Santa Monica so that's where we headed Friday morning. We got on the freeway and decided to stay in the carpool lane and held out till we got to the Santa Monica area for breakfast. We had bagels with cream cheese and americanos at Tanner's Coffee.
My Linux netbook wouldn't connect to their free WiFi service so I didn't get to check my email for the whole trip.

We were very successful in our shopping on Montana Avenue but you'll have to wait to hear about that adventure.

We then headed downtown to shop at Penzeys Spices. Jerry stocked up on spices. Later, you'll hear about some other fun stores we happened to run into.

We had lunch on the Third Street Promenade. I had a caprese sandwich. Yum.

We finished with our shopping and headed home. We were not ready to do any cooking. So we went off to another fine restaurant.

That's just a taste of our vacation. I'll tell you what we did between meals later.

Tennis anyone?

Jerry and I went to Pacific Taco #1 for supper tonight. We're on vacation and aren't cooking. The restaurant usually has some South-of-the-Border music playing on the juke box. But tonight there was no music. Just schmoozing between regular customers and the people behind the counter.

The TV was on, but without sound. It was tuned to ESPN and was showing a match from the US Open tennis tournament.

Tennis was the only sport I ever willingly participated in. I was introduced to it through my best friend through my junior high school days (I seem to have changed friends each time I changed schools).

I took lessons in the summer-activities-in-the-park program. One lesson that stuck in my mind was How to Deliver a Killer Serve. The instructor told us to hold our rackets just so, toss the ball into the air, and swing the racket through the ball with a motion we would use as if we were hurling the racket at our opponent. My friend, Kenny, mastered that serve. It would put an incredible amount of spin on the ball so after it curved into the ground it would take off in a strange direction, as if it hit a little wall on the court.

Most of us couldn't quite get the hang of the serve. Some even messed it up so badly that they managed to hurl their rackets at their opponents.

At the end of the six weeks of lessons, we'd have a tournament. The entry fee was a can of new balls. You were out of the tournament after you lost your first match. The loser of each match would get the balls that were used in the match. In one tournament I got to start out against one of the best players in the program. I went home after that first match with the can of balls. I'm sure I lost 6-0, 6-0.

I even participated in the junior high school's tennis program. It was an after school activity where we just played games against others in the program. We didn't play against other schools. It was for fun with little, if any, competition.

I think I kept this tennis thing up for about three years. Each year would start out with a nasty blister on my thumb where it rubbed against the racket. It took a few weeks to figure out how to grip the racket at the start of each year.

Tennis was a good sport for me. I was good enough at it to have fun. And I was on my own. I'm not a team player. Probably because I was always among the last to be chosen for teams in gym class.

(I don't think that any of my family ever watched me play in my few competitions. But I'm not complaining, mind you, just observing.)

I even followed professional tennis. When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-'70s while working in the B-1 Division of Rockwell International ("Where Science gets down to Business"), I went to The Strings' World TeamTennis games at the Fabulous Forum. (I'm stunned to find out that WTT is still in business.) I'd even know who was playing at Wimbledon.

But I don't follow it or any other sport now. I didn't recognize the names of either of the players tonight. The closest I've gotten to tennis in a long time were the occasional emails I'd get offering me hot pix of Anna Kournikova. I had no idea who they were talking about. (Roger Federer, on the other hand...)

I guess I'm over tennis.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A lamp.